There was nothing very typical about the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, particularly in its later editions. Its colossal size and staggering influence made it, as John King explains at the outset of this rewarding study, “unlike any other book published in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England” (1). The fourth edition of 1583, running to almost 4 million words and crammed with exquisitely rendered woodcuts, was “the most physically imposing, complicated and technically demanding English book of its era” (1). And yet, as King reveals, the history of this exceptional book offers us valuable glimpses of every facet of early modern print culture: the constituent parts of what Robert Darnton, invoked by King, has termed the interlinked “communications circuit” among writer, publisher, printer, bookseller, and reader (14). We have unusually rich reserves of evidence about how Foxe's book was conceived, produced, marketed, and received by its readership. King uses them all to great advantage.

Not that referring to the Acts and Monuments as “Foxe's book” is always appropriate. As King, in line with much recent scholarship, explains, it is best to see the Book of Martyrs as a supremely collaborative effort, and Foxe as “an auctor or compilator” rather than a conventional author (21). Along with those who contributed sections of text, Foxe deployed a sprawling network of correspondents, document gatherers, transcribers, eyewitnesses, and fact-checking agents. The role of Foxe's publisher John Day, especially in the business of commissioning and preserving the work's woodcuts, is also far more pivotal than earlier generations of scholars acknowledged. In such a context, notions of authorial intent are inevitably confused, and, as King explains, even trying to locate a particular text in which collaborative intentions are enshrined is probably a fool's errand. There is precious little fixity in Foxe. The Book of Martyrs went through many editions and countless abridgments, and each of these ought to be treated as a discrete text, each responding to specific cultural and historical circumstances. Nor should such patterns simply be traced in obvious ways such as alterations in the book's contents—the inclusion, in the second edition, of rebuttals to Catholic charges of falsification, for instance. We should also track the subtler transformations on the material page, even down to the level of layout and typography. Such trends reveal “how the shifting material forms of these books affected the understanding of generations of readers” (92).

King does a superb job of showing how these editorial processes operated, stressing that various techniques and conventions were used to appeal to those at different levels in the hierarchy of literacy. But for all their sophisticated methods, Foxe and his collaborators could only ever partially succeed in manipulating and guiding their readers. The role of the reader in creating the book (or any book) is given appropriate emphasis in these pages; after all, it is impossible to deny the hugely varied ways in which the Book of Martyrs has been received and interpreted. King moves beyond such truisms, however, and cites a wealth of specific examples of readers’ responses to the book: everything from the defacing of images, to marginal comments, to the filling in of empty banderols in the book's woodcut images. King also provides instructive discussions of how the book was used by different sections of literate society—as a source of domestic advice for husbands, homilies for preachers, or pious nuggets for those who kept diaries and commonplace books—and of the different ways the book might have been read.

There is much else of value here: notably, accounts of Foxe's immersion in the print industry both at home and on the continent, and surveys of the literary and historiographical influences that guided Foxe and his collaborators. King also has interesting things to say about how the book's use of woodcuts informs our discussion of Protestant attitudes to the visual image and about the key role played by manuscripts in the creation of this iconic printed volume, and he makes a fascinating point about posthumous donations of the book serving “a memorial function roughly analogous to medieval practises that commemorated the dead” (5). This study offers a well-researched blow-by-blow account of how the Book of Martyrs was conceived, constructed, and sent out into the literary world, but it is perhaps at its most revelatory when it uses King's exploration of scores of extant copies of the book to pry into the reading habits of early modern people. The drops of candle wax, the bookmarks, the improvised indices, and the marginal doodles all bring us a little closer to the intimate detail of the early modern reading experience. Tiny fragments of seeds and nutshells embedded in the page remind us that, when poring over the edifying stories of Protestant martyrs, Tudor and Stuart readers sometimes still found time to attend to their appetites.

King claims that the history of this one book epitomizes the history of the book during the period. John Foxe and his collaborators are shown to have been extraordinarily imaginative compositors, editors, and propagandists, but the extraordinary nature of their achievements does make one wonder whether the Book of Martyrs can serve as an exemplum of early modern print culture. Similarly, John Day was, as King recognizes, a decidedly idiosyncratic publisher: quite unusually, he oversaw all aspects of his business, as printer, publisher, and bookseller. Such reservations aside, this excellent book offers many insights into how early modern books were made and read.